Circling Toward Home

By Sharon Hope Fabriz

Described as "brave," "powerful," and "simultaneously personal and political," Circling Toward Home stretches from the Civil Rights-era Mississippi home of an F.B.I. family from Minnesota and tumbles across state lines and social boundaries to the present day as a woman breaks with expectations to locate herself in a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrd & Wyld Publishing
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735072678

Book preview

part one: rally

pilgrim path

she wanders deep into the forest,

her wheeled baggage sparking fires.

from the sycamore’s crest,

a mute hawk eyes the story

that seethes in her mouth.

she spits at the flames and journeys on

as the forest smolders

with all that needs to be told.

someday, she’ll be on a raft in full dark,

coasting trails of wind and water,

wrapped in a blanket of blue,

oars at her feet,

shoes now pillows,

toes dangling in mother sea,

above her star spirals

dancing like sands on tide.

someday she’ll swallow that holy communion,

the promise of all that surrounds her.

one

Iwalked with Mocha under a cloudless California sky, my head wrapped in a red scarf to buffer the November wind. An incoming signal interrupted the voice of a favorite meditation teacher, sending me fumbling for my cell. Some phone calls arrive like flashes of lightning that alter the atmosphere. Mine came from my sister while on this brisk walk with my dog, the walk we take every morning no matter the weather, no matter the day, no matter the errands awaiting.

Something’s happened to Daddy. He can’t speak. I’ll call you later. The connection ended before I could reply. I pulled Mocha’s leash up short, bringing her closer. A gust pushed me off balance. Keep walking, I told myself. Keep walking.

As I approached our front yard, the glory of the golden ginkgo against the cobalt sky fluttered a greeting. You’re beautiful, I said, addressing it as I often did. For an instant, I pinged to the Swedish flag, my family roots, my grandmothers. Then, I stepped through the door and broke the quiet of morning, stunned. Trish? I need you!

Soon, in another call from my sister, I discovered that Daddy lay in a St. Paul hospital’s emergency center. A stroke? A tumor? An MRI would tell more. Earlier that morning he tried to hang his pajamas on the curtain rod. Leo, what are you DOING? his wife sparred.

When he turned toward her, he was all a blather. The look on his face told Jane that things were not right. Ellie! she yelled into the hallway. Ellie!

My only sibling and younger sister had been in Minnesota for Daddy’s latest doctor visit. Ellie was scheduled to head home the next day to her occupational therapy role with brain injury patients at a Houston rehabilitation hospital, but Daddy gave her one more chore.

Let’s go to the car. I could imagine her saying. We’re going to the hospital, Daddy. She must have ferried him down the stairs, their long limbs wrapped around each other in tentative motion. She must have helped him with his coat and explained that she was going to drive. Daddy sat in the front with Ellie, and his wife leaned in from the back. As Ellie drove, she must have taken stock of Daddy’s condition. Jane couldn’t get her bearings and delivered confusing driving directions. After circling the unfamiliar vicinity of the hospital one too many times, Ellie had the presence of mind to pull over and call 911.

Working toward steadier breaths, I waited in Sacramento by my fully-charged cell to hear what to do next. I fussed over pans of bacon and eggs. My body threw me into control mode. I devoured the protein and encouraged myself to stay the course on my thirty-day purge from gluten, dairy, sugar, and alcohol. Already sixteen days in, I was feeling better for it. Approaching sixty, migraines, muscle aches, and extra pounds weighed me down, but I vowed to give my body a fighting chance to thrive. Anticipating travel, I packed almond butter, apples, protein bars, and herbal tea bags to give myself a decent running start.

Trish, my beloved partner of seventeen years, planted herself out of my way, waiting for a lull in my action. I noticed. Something needed to slow me down. Hot water and lavender might do the trick. I need a shower, I confessed as I sped toward the tub.

I turned my back on the spray as it pounded my neck. Keep that headache at bay, I begged myself, even though the years taught me that I was powerless to stop such arrivals. I angled my head toward my chest, then stretched left and right, groaning at the tightness that reached beyond my shoulder blades. No amount of wondering would tell me what I wanted to know: What’s going on with Daddy? The scented steam rose like an elixir, and I felt myself soften. Eyes closed, I succumbed to inhales and exhales. Your breath is always with you, my Tai Chi teacher reminded me more than once.

A voice mail came through when I was in the shower. Come now. Today if you can. After hearing Ellie’s blunt commands, I reserved a seat on a flight leaving that afternoon. I would take the familiar route to St. Paul for the fifth time in ten months, having just returned from Minnesota two short weeks before.

The scent of sandalwood crept in from the living room as sympathetic jazz filled the air. Trish knew how to show care. She caught me off-guard with a hug from behind as I folded warm, clean clothes for the trip. I’ll be here for you, babe. Don’t forget that. I turned and held on to her long and hard. A deep sigh finally released.

I texted the kids about Grandpa Leo, then lit a candle and pulled together some words for as much of a prayer as I could muster. Daddy, feel safe. Rest in a field of love.

In a moment the world can change. Flashes of bombs or brilliance disintegrate into gristle or glitter and make life something that it hadn’t yet been. Civilizations capitalize on it. Economies depend on it. Art expresses it. The dynamism incites what humans call disasters or miracles and what gods call the natural order. I rose that morning to a celebration of sky and leaves more brilliant than any I had seen yet that season. Autumn rustled with its perennial truth. Life changes when the world is headed toward darkness, and some things put on a show as they go.

two

My one-way flight had me heading toward mystery. At cruising altitude, the horizon gave way to haze from start to finish. A sudden ticket purchase on the weekend prior to Thanksgiving offered one grace, a window seat.

For months, Daddy had been failing Basic Memory 101. His phone calls came more frequently with the same questions about the same things. No longer was he giving me a list of the latest books he had read, updating me on his jaunts to social functions and cultural events, or outlining the latest honey-do projects on his schedule. His questions shrank to single syllables: How’s school? How are the kids? How old is your car now?

Daddy’s wife, Jane, called both Ellie and me during the previous winter when he was out shoveling snow. She admitted to their troubles and that it was really getting bad, girls, with the emphasis on girls. Our appearances in the lives of Daddy and Jane had been limited in the three decades of their marriage, which commenced the year after our parent’s divorce. Jane had been widowed several years before. Her daughter Nina was a tad younger than Ellie. We three women had functional relationships stunted by the geographical and cultural formulas that framed us. Nina lived on a farm in western Wisconsin with a husband she married fresh out of college. She viewed life from a conservative angle, like Ellie, who lived in a rural swath of Houston, divorced with two grown children and three grandchildren. Ellie’s conservatism complimented her devout Christian faith. Neither conservative nor devout, at least in that manner of speaking, I lived in Sacramento with Trish and had two grown children from an early marriage, a son in LA and a daughter in a NorCal mountain town. The intersection where Nina, Ellie, and I met was drawn by blood lines and social contracts, our duties marked by what daughters do—politics, religion, and lifestyles aside.

Daddy’s presence in our adulthoods had been sporadic at best. We all saw each other in spurts, feeling our way on the fringes of each other’s lives. Daddy and Jane made infrequent visits to see us, and my trips to Minnesota had been limited to annual long weekends. For many years now, I kept my guard up for self-protection since my family never made a full embrace ofmy sexuality. I couldn’t recall ever sharing a heart-to-heart moment with Jane, but the really getting bad, girls felt like a cry for help. Even the liberal, lesbian daughter needed to show up.

So it was that I became more actively involved in my father’s health. I flew to St. Paul in February, following Ellie’s visit a couple weeks before. We were determined to understand for ourselves the scope of Daddy’s issues. Our discoveries confirmed the cognitive decline diagnosis, the first stop on the road to full-blown Alzheimer’s.

What this suggested was that Ellie and I would be traveling to Minnesota more regularly than we had been and that various tasks would await us: doctor’s appointments, senior apartment tours, bank and lawyer meetings—all swirling in the dust storm of what cognitive decline means to the everyday, to the practical, to the future. We would have to prepare alright, although we didn’t know for what.

I pressed my forehead against the window, staring onto the desert thousands of feet below. While burrowed into my corner with a book cupped in my hands, I read, and then reread a passage that had the ring of something I learned in childhood. Krishna speaks to his student, Arjuna, in a recap of a a timeless story from a holy text.¹ Keep all your senses tuned to the ineffable at all times. Listen for and follow my guidance every step of the way. A Bible verse I memorized as a child rose to mind, Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy path.² The masculine pronouns sidelined me, but the genderless spirit behind them still held power. In an effort to correct the biblical marketing that saturated my youth, and gained enough selfhood to do so, I composed a new version of that verse that repaired the pitfall of patriarchal pronouns. Trust in the Source with all your heart and don’t believe everything you think, I translated. In all ways, acknowledge the sacred, and everything you encounter will instruct your way. My inability to act as the primary source of my own spiritual life was stunted by nature and nurture, but after decades on the planet, I learned that I could adapt language to fit my experience, my identity, my soul. Why not let those words be with me now to light the path ahead?

A domino of decades dropped me into worlds that insisted I pay attention, learn to ask questions, and decide in all my comings and goings what to take with me and what to leave behind. In my spiritual life, that was most true. How does the child of a lawman and a preacher’s daughter end up revising the rulebook of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Let me count the ways.

My hybrid system of spirituality may have insulted purists, but my earthly voyage led me to integrate many wisdom ways. I was wholly responsible for what I believed and how I behaved as a result, but I learned the hard way that one requirement for growth involved jumping the white picket fence of my youth, and I banged myself up in the process. This is the story of my journey, one made from strands of time that spun me hither and yon, unraveling my sense of self and my faith in the Almighty. Turn the wound into light… go into the heart of the difficulty,³ I underlined as turbulence shook the airliner.

As the plane descended, the Twin Cities landscape was a lifeless camouflage of browns and grays. Leafless trees rattled a skeleton’s welcome. When was the last time I had been in Minnesota for Thanksgiving? When I was a child?

Packs of holiday travelers scurried through the airport anticipating turkey dinners and the biggest shopping day of the year at Mall of the Americas et al. I maneuvered through the crowd and waited in line for a rideshare. My driver was cheerful and talkative, warming up my social skills and letting me release a few jitters as I scoured the scene for some of my favorite views, the neat midwest neighborhoods, the bundled-up cyclists, the quirky storefronts of Dinkytown.

The hospital perched near the banks of the Mississippi River, a reassuring sign. As landmarks went, the river was a hallmark that stretched from my grandparent’s past into mine. Daddy’s childhood home in South Minneapolis had been less than a mile from the river and even closer to Minnehaha Park and The Falls, where the creek took its glorious tumble, one I never tired of seeing.

As planned, Ellie met me in the chilly lobby. She commanded a first impression as a substantial, confident woman with a height of nearly six feet. She maintained her self-imposed blond locks in a precise bob. When she saw me, what did she see? Was I the more congenial one? A couple inches shorter than she, my once-highlighted hair had already brightened at the roots to white. Aside from our builds and the number and ages of our children, our similarities waned. Close sisters we were not. We exchanged clever, witty birthdays cards, rarely sentimental ones. Our habit was not to say our I love yous or even to hug unless custom demanded it. Our choices split the sibling bond. I blamed myself and left it at that. Would we ever connect like I had with my closest friends? I hoped that someday we would. I imagined us as two old women sharing a stroll in the park and regretting that we had not tended our sisterhood like we could have.

Let’s sit down. Ellie suggested. We hugged weakly then took the nearest chairs. The news is not good, she said matter-of-factly. Daddy has brain cancer. He’s got three months, maybe. Ellie was never one to sugarcoat the truth.

I closed my eyes and inhaled. What! How? My heart flipped and pounded in a shock of waves. Oh, no! I reached out hoping for a hand squeeze but in an awkward motion had to clasp my own hands together instead. Ellie was not in the mood for touches. She continued in full possession of herself, objective and succinct, like she might do for a family member of one of her patients.

The doctor saw surgery as the most hopeful alternative, and it was scheduled for early the next morning. I still need to fly home tomorrow, Ellie explained. She supervised a team that would be short-staffed and had grandchildren to host for the holiday. I’ll come back later if needed, she assured in a tone tinged with a hint of hope or blind faith that all would be well.

I’ll be in close touch, I assured her. Is this really happening? I put my hands to my cheeks.

It’s happening, Ellie said, her eyes tired with sadness and certainty.

In the old days, we would have had a prayer before heading toward the sickbed of a loved one, but these were new days, and we were as different as our mother and father, a split that time tore even further asunder. I wish I would have at least said, I love you, but I didn’t. I dashed to keep up with her as she forged her way down the hall.

---

¹ Bhagavad Gita

² Proverbs 3: 5-6 KJV

³ Cope, Stephen, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey of Your True Calling (2012)

three

My suitcase whirred behind me along the waxy floors as Ellie marched ahead. She knew her way around hospitals. My days and weeks on Trish’s stem cell transplant floor three years ago stripped me of any desire to visit a hospital again.

Not only that, but even as I planted myself in the forward movement of Ellie’s foot falls, my mind sped backward to a younger face of my father, his signature whistle of notes, g-eee-c-g-eee, Sha-ron, come ho-me. Then memories spilled from the blur of years that held our attempts to manage a connection over differences and distance, troubles and time. Suddenly, everything stopped. Ellie stood waiting at the door.

Entering Daddy’s hospital room was like crossing over into a three-dimensional puzzle. My eyes first fell on the family, perched like mourning doves on the long window bench. Jane leaned in the corner, her head tilted against a colorless wall. Had she grown smaller? My definition of her teetered between stepmother and curiosity. She stepped into Daddy’s life where Momma left off, in the years when my children were toddlers. As a husband, Daddy had split six decades, nearly thirty years each, between two women with opposing energies and ways. He hadn’t spoken to Momma since their divorce.

Jane’s only child, Nina, and her husband sat bolt upright, coats stuffed in the space between them. They rose and greeted me with hugs as Ellie reclaimed the tufted chair. My presence completed the family roll call even though I knew the ways I still didn’t belong.

I took my place at the patient’s side, cold metal rails keeping me at an institutional distance. I held them like crutches, glad for their steely resistance. Daddy was propped at an angle in partial recline, his bare arms dangling from the hospital gown, the likes of which he hadn’t worn since his prostate cancer surgery more than a decade ago. Electrodes dotted his head, calculating what they could. He looked like the victim of a Frankenstein scheme, his confused smile and rosy cheeks elevating the effect. I peered into his eyes and wished to crawl inside his mind, to see what he saw, hear what he heard, know what he knew. I had been trying to do that for years and still had few clues about the holdings of his heart. Life long, his affability had been an antidote (a cover?) to untraceable emotions. If I was honest with myself, he and I had that in common.

Over the years, we disrupted each other’s lives in our attempts at selfhood, never acknowledging or apologizing for the upsets. Instead, we tromped through them. Daddy gave me a childhood of flux, and I ruffled his conservative feathers. Would we ever come to terms with the righteous indignation we both felt about each other or was I the only one who lived with a resentment that I could not address in any other way but to suppress it? Common courtesy trumped our needs to express ourselves to each other. We maintained a respectable warmth between us that ranked our familial obligations above our opinions about freedom, justice, and love. We each had evidence for our views—the stories of our lives. Still, we upheld certain notions we had been raised to accept, among them that fathers and daughters have duties to each other.

Hi, Daddy, I said as I placed my hand over his and squeezed. I’m happy to see you.

His eyes twinkled in what I wanted to be recognition and he nodded. Dafjcvniresdfa or something like that ushered forth from him, a new language of crossfires I couldn’t translate. Then, he went back to what he had been doing before—pointing to the clock and the white board and to us and back to himself like he was searching for corroboration.

After the exchange at Daddy’s bedside, I wedged myself and my belongings between Jane and Nina. I kept my legs uncrossed and tried to lengthen my spine by pushing my palms against my knees and straightening my arms. Breathe, I reminded myself. How are you doing? I asked Jane as my elbows went slack. I placed my hand lightly on her knee.

It’s been awful, she said. Did Ellie tell you? She waved her hand in front of her face and coughed. A word stuck in her throat. Cancer. She looked toward her husband. She had nothing else to say.

How did we get from a diagnosis of mild cognitive decline based on a brain scan a few months earlier to glioblastoma today? I recalled the neurology appointment three weeks before when Ellie and I waited together in the lobby at the medical center to hear an update on Daddy’s condition. He was with the